This section is intended to provide a background or context to the disclosed embodiments that are recited in the claims. The description herein may include concepts that could be pursued, but are not necessarily ones that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, what is described in this section is not prior art to the description and claims in this application and is not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
In recent years, social media and social media-related technologies and platforms have proliferated such that interactions through social media has become an increasingly important part of many people's daily lives. Enabled by ubiquitously accessible and scalable communication technologies, social media has provided alternate means for communication between organizations, communities, and individuals. Social media often utilize web-based and mobile technologies to turn communication into an interactive dialogue. For example, a group of Internet-based applications can allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content. The content that is exchanged in a social media setting can include, but is not limited to, audio, video, still image, text, mark-up language, software, and combinations thereof.
Identification of content (i.e., user-generated or otherwise produced content) can be accomplished in different ways. For example, when a content is organized in a file structure, a filename may be used to identify the content. Additionally, or alternatively, additional information, often called metadata, can accompany the content to enable the inclusion of identification information as part of a content file structure. For example, such metadata can be stored as part of a file header.
Other techniques for identifying a content rely on the inclusion of embedded watermarks in a content. Watermarks are designed to carry auxiliary information without substantially affecting fidelity of the host content, or without interfering with normal usage of the host content. Embedded watermarks can be utilized to convey information such as a content identifier (ID), a content name, a content owner, and the like.
Fingerprinting is yet another technique that may be used to identify a content. As opposed to watermarks, which are additional signals embedded into a host content, fingerprints are calculated based on inherent characteristics of the content. Similar to an actual fingerprint that uniquely identifies a person, specific characteristics (e.g., distribution of frequency components) of a content can be computed and distilled into a set of parameters, or a bit string, that allows unique identification of that content. Fingerprint computations are often carried out for consecutive segments of a content to produce a series of parameters or bit strings, which are then stored at a fingerprint database along with other identification information, such as content name, content owner and the like. When a received content is to be identified, the content's fingerprint is computed and compared against the stored database fingerprints until a match is found.
Despite the advent of social media that has enabled unique interactions among various entities, the role of content identification techniques has largely remained unchanged.